Functionalist Approaches To Translation Of Chinese Cooking And Dietary Culture

Having filmed from March,2001, A Bite of China is the first high-definition documentary about food. It shows different diet change, eating habits and unique taste in China, and even the Eastern life values. It helps oversea audiences get a closer look at the traditional and changing China from the food aspect. In the year of 2013, this extremely famous documentary published versions of 9 foreign languages by popular demand, which acquaints themselves with Chinese food and Chinese culture.In recent years, the cooking and dietary culture translation heats up gradually, nevertheless there exists some problems, such as translate word by word, ignore cultural differences, chinglish, redundancy, etc.. At the same time, these studies mainly focus on the dish name translation, ignoring the real meaning of the catering culture. A Bite of China is a perfect combination of diet and culture, which is of great significance to understand Chinese cooking and dietary culture for the whole world.The English version of A Bite of China aims to promote Chinese food and traditional culture, giving foreigners more chances to love Chinese culture. And more importantly, it is beneficial to improve the international status and image of China. However, the differences of language, culture, social system and ideology between China and other countries bring about more difficulties in the process of translation.After careful study of Chinese cooking and dietary culture and the English version of A Bite of China, the author of the thesis introduces the common type of cooking and dietary culture and commonly-used translation methods. From the perspective of functionalist approaches of translation, the cooking and dietary culture translation is not only a language translation, but cultural transfer. Finally on the basis of the Nord’s theory of function plus loyalty, the author makes the evaluation of the English version and supports the practicability of the theory through some examples of translation.Through the analysis of the English version of A Bite of China, this thesis tries to provide a powerful supplement for Chinese cooking and dietary culture translation and pragmatic translation theories, and to make a little contribution to the popularization of Chinese cooking and dietary culture.